Oracle has certainly been incredibly committed to keeping Java and the whole ecosystem as strong and as healthy as can be.

-- James Gosling, Oracle

Java creator James Gosling, who served as chief technology officer of Sun's Developer Products Group, and who now holds the title of CTO for Oracle's Client Software Group, delivered the opening keynote March 17 at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas, saying he was "encouraged" by the direction Oracle is taking with Java.

"I don't think anybody in this room has anything to worry about," he said. "Oracle has certainly been incredibly committed to keeping Java and the whole ecosystem as strong and as healthy as can be."

Gosling's presentation centered on the recently released Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 specification, which was approved November 30 after several years of work. Java EE 6 offers capabilities such as modularity and task-based profiles, plus a Web-based profile and a full profile.

The Web profile is the first Java EE profile to be defined. It is a "fully functional midsize stack for modern Web application development," Gosling said. "We wanted to focus on the Web tier in this release. We wanted to create a level playing field for Web frameworks."

The modularity in Java EE 6 comes from the use of OSGi blueprints, Gosling said, commenting, "One of the things that come out of this is a simpler way of packaging Web applications. It is also easier to plug into a management framework ... It completely changes the way you think about writing web applications. You don't have to worry about changing config files. Development becomes really fluid."

The Java EE 6 specification also features APIs such as JAX-RS 1.1 (Java API for RESTful Web Services), Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1, Managed Beans 1.0, and Java-WS (Java API for XML-based Web Services) 2.2. He also noted that dependency injection in Java EE 6 provides a way to inject dependencies in code. "Dependency injection allows you to inject dependencies in your code and you'll be able to use the annotations features in JDK 5 [Java Development Kit 5] to factor out boilerplate," he said.

Gosling touched on GlassFish application server, which is the reference implementation for Java EE 6. He pointed out that GlassFish is the world's most downloaded application server, at 1 million downloads per month.

On JavaFX, which features JavaFX Script as a declarative scripting language for graphical user interfaces, Gosling said, "It is not about generating Web pages, it's about building rich graphical user interfaces on the desktop.

"The thing that's nice about Java is that it's a two-level specification," Gosling said. "There's the Java language, but the magic is in the VM [virtual machine] and how it works with other languages like Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Python, PHP, JavaScript, JavaFX and a host of other languages. Literally hundreds of languages can run on top of the JVM [Java VM]. It's a nice way to develop your app using all kinds of different tools in all kinds of different ways."

The Java Store, a consumer-facing storefront for Java and JavaFX applications, has had a slight setback, Gosling said. This came when the company's accountants told the engineering team they had to implement a system to handle taxation of items sold in the store.

"We said, Why can't we just be eBay?" Gosling said. "But we've come up with a viable tax solution and I expect that we will have a new release of the Java Store for developers coming out any day now. The feedback from the developer community has been really enthusiastic."

Gosling delivered an update on the use of Java worldwide. According to his statistics, the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) is downloaded 15 million times a week, there are 10 billion Java-enabled devices, 1 billion Java-enabled desktops, 100 million Java-enabled TV devices, 2.6 billion Java-enabled mobile devices, 5.5 billion Java smart cards and more than 6.5 million professional Java developers.

"There are actually more Java-enabled devices on the planet than there are people," he said. "It's an incredibly vibrant ecosystem."